array of structures, or structure of arrays?

Question

Hmmm. I have a table which is an array of structures I need to store in Java. The naive don\'t-worry-about-memory approach says do this:

public class Record          


        

Answer 1

I was curious so I actually ran a benchmark. If you don't re-create the object like you are[1], then SoA beats AoS by 5-100% depending on workload[2]. See my code here:

https://gist.github.com/twolfe18/8168262c5420c7a62d39

[1] I didn't add that because if you are concerned enough about speed to consider this refactor, it would be silly to do that.

[2] This also doesn't account for re-allocation, but again, this is often something you can either amortize away or know statically. This is a reasonable assumption for a pure-speed benchmark.